Emergency alert systems are used to communicate vital information to the public during emergency situations. This information is generally conveyed to the public via televisions or public addressing systems. Refinements of emergency alert systems provide an emergency alert notification message to specific locations, but fail to dynamically supply local contextually important information to particular recipients of the message.
For example, U.S. Pre-Grant Publication No. 2003/0069002 discusses a system that delivers notification content to multiple users. In particular, this system delivers emergency notification content from a message originating source to one or more transmitting sources. A subset of potential recipients is then selected based on the subject of the notification and the notification content is then delivered to a device associated with each such recipient. While the location of the recipient may be known, the message content is not altered based on that knowledge.
U.S. Pre-Grant Publication No. 2003/0137415 discusses a system that communicates safety information from a centralized monitoring service (e.g., 911 dispatcher) to affected areas. A central device encodes the message and transmits it to one or more receiving devices at different locations. Notification messages may be tailored to the locations that are being addressed, i.e., different notifications based on location of the receiving device. However, devices in this system are at fixed locations.
As can be appreciated from the discussion above, conventional emergency alert systems may generally have sent notification messages to recipients to alert them of an emergency situation, but have failed to provide local contextually important information to particular recipients of the messages.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.